


you want a better story (did you get what you deserve?)

by achillese



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Movie Fusion, Dark, Gen, Memory Alteration, Mild Gore, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-11
Updated: 2014-04-11
Packaged: 2018-01-19 00:54:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1449283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/achillese/pseuds/achillese
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin is fourteen when he starts keeping a body count by carving tally marks into the soles of his boots with a knife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you want a better story (did you get what you deserve?)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asilentherald](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asilentherald/gifts).



> This is so, so, so highly experimental and fairly weird. Mostly inspired by the fact that I saw _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ two times within five days of its release date, and the fact that I just kind of wanted to write a dark Merlin fic.
> 
> If you don't know about the Winter Soldier in terms of what his relationship is within the confines of the Captain America storyline, this fic might not make much sense to you. (Sorry!!)
> 
> Some ugliness ahead.

He’s fifteen years old and the only thing he knows for sure is that there’s a place in a man’s back where, if you stab properly and hard enough, you can sever the spine. 

-

It’s the sixth century and a small six-year-old Merlin wakes up on a small cot in his mother’s cottage in Ealdor, breathing in fumes from the fire that’s currently ravaging the rest of the village. He can hear screams from the other villagers, high-pitched and helpless, and he wonders for a brief moment if any of his friends are out there in the chaos, running from the flames.

He’s too scared to move from the cot but he looks across the small room to where his mother usually sleeps and she’s not there. Perhaps she fled already. Perhaps she’d gone to get help so she could fetch him and save him too. Merlin doesn’t know. All he knows is that he’s alone in the cottage, curling into a smaller ball under his threadbare blanket as though hiding from the flames will save him.

The cottage door bangs open and dust falls off the floor where it slams into the wood there. A woman with blonde hair that he doesn’t recognize sweeps her way into the cottage and scoops him up in his arms without a word of warning. Merlin doesn’t bother struggling. He thinks he’s being saved.

She smells like wood and something decaying.

-

He’s ten years old when she – Morgause, the woman from the fire – makes him forget.

It’s not quick and it’s not painless, and it’s a spell from the Old Religion that turns his memories to smoke and allows them to slip through his fingers. She says it’s because he has a higher purpose, a bigger destiny that lay ahead, and all his old memories of his mother and Ealdor would only hinder his progress.

He believes her because he has no other choice.

She still calls him Merlin when she’s finished but the name sounds awkward to his ears.

-

He learns about the spine trick at age fourteen when he kills his first victim.

“Target,” Morgause corrects him when he reports back to her. “The knight was a target, not a victim. He’s innocent of nothing. None of these men are.”

Merlin never refers to them as victims again. He starts keeping a body count by carving tally marks into the soles of his boots with a knife.

-

Merlin’s knuckles are bleeding and his lip is split and his teeth are aching from where he was punched in the mouth, but he’s proud of himself for having managed to hold his own against a knight of Essetir in a physical fight. He would’ve used magic to defeat the knight effortlessly, but Morgause warned against it – for now. She wanted to keep that side of him a secret until the last possible moment, a last resort in the war for their right to exist. 

Merlin doesn’t mind. His knuckles scar over and he rubs at the shiny new skin with a kind of reverence that he hasn’t known in a long time.

-

It’s the sixth century and the body count in Essetir is increasing as Merlin and Morgause travel in unplanned circles around the kingdom, biding their time and lying in wait like a snake getting ready to strike. 

They eat whatever nature offers them, usually vegetation, but every once in awhile a rabbit or a deer will wander into a trap that Merlin made and they’d eat like proverbial royalty for the next day or so, depending on their appetites. 

Merlin is sixteen and growing stronger every day. Morgause watches him for any signs of hesitation or doubt in their cause but finds none. 

He believes in himself. 

He believes in _them_.

-

It’s the sixth century and they call him – 

-

Merlin is eighteen and bleeding, his left side a bloody mess of skin and muscle, white bone peeking out at sharp angles that he can see if his tilts his head a certain way, aided by the fact that his left arm was now missing. A knight, the best that Merlin had ever stood against, had made one good slice and taken his arm clean off at the shoulder, leaving nothing but a stump behind. It had all happened so quickly that Merlin didn’t even notice the knight flee the scene as he took stock of the damage done, the one man to ever escape his grasp.

Morgause tried wrapping up what was left of his arm and applying pressure on the wound, but only magic could help him now. 

There was a spell, buried in the deepest parts of the Old Religion, that could take the toughest, most unyielding metal and bend it to the user’s will. From this, Morgause fashioned a new arm for Merlin, an arm that reacted and moved the way his flesh-and-blood one used to. 

“How does it feel?” she asks him when she’s finished, sitting back on the tree stump she’d been using as a seat. 

Merlin sits in front of her, cross-legged on the ground, wiggling his new fingers experimentally. He makes a fist easily and looks up at her in wide-eyed appreciation. “It feels perfect,” he says, and it’s the truth.

She smiles at him and touches the place on his shoulder where metal meets gnarled raw skin.

The new arm slightly stronger than his right one and always would be, but Merlin has no qualms with that as he quickly learns that strangling a man is much easier if it’s metal fingers coiling around soft flesh.

He is the sword and she is the arm that wields it, and together they cut a path for Camelot when Merlin turns twenty-one and she deems him ready enough to face off against the knights that defend Uther Pendragon’s kingdom.

The tally marks on the soles of his boots are in the double digits now. Merlin kills a wayward beggar on the way to Camelot just to get in the practice and he spends twenty minutes at a riverbank washing the blood out from the crevices of his metal hand. He gets most of it out but in the cracks the stains turn dark red as they dry. Morgause says not to worry about it, so he doesn’t.

Before leaving him at Camelot, Morgause returns to him his memories of Ealdor and swaps them for his memories of their years together, traveling the five kingdoms and cutting through knights like they were nothing more than gnats. She says it’s because he’ll be more believable if he really feels like ‘himself.’

Merlin doesn’t know what that means anymore – how is he his own person? – but it doesn’t matter in the end because as soon as his memories are swapped, he forgets who Morgause even is, and all that matters is finding a place to stay within the walls.

-

Gaius, the court physician and an old friend of Merlin’s mother, welcomes him with open arms. He becomes Merlin’s guardian and Merlin takes on the role of apprentice. Under Gaius’s watchful eye, he works to cure ailments and save lives within the walls of Camelot.

Morgause, in the guise of a beggar woman living in squalor somewhere in the forest nearby, keeps watch over him, makes sure he doesn’t accidentally get on the Pendragons’ bad side; he needs to gain their trust for her plans to work. 

Before wiping his memories she’d fashioned a coating for his left arm out of animal skin and magic, to hide the fact that it’s made of metal. It blends in seamlessly and he hides out in the open, just another apprentice at work, able to wear short-sleeves and not worry about anyone noticing that something’s off.

-

Morgause never planned for Merlin and Arthur Pendragon to become close, but it’s a bonus as she watches them through her scrying crystal: bantering, shoving each other, rolling their eyes, smiling, laughing.

Morgause wonders if the Merlin she’s watching is the real person, the boy whose childhood she crushed in her hands when she set fire to Ealdor to weed him out in the first place, or if she’s watching another ghost take shape.

-

It’s the sixth century and Morgause hears whispers that, in hers and Merlin’s time lying in wait at Camelot, the people of Albion have given her protégé another name. Word of the man with the silver arm who can kill as easily as one can breathe spreads across all five kingdoms like wildfire. The man with the silver arm who has an affinity for cutting down knights and guards becomes the stuff of campfire stories. 

Rumors start. Men claim to have survived encounters with this mysterious hellfiend, but everyone knows these men to be liars; nobody meets this silver-armed man and lives to tell the tale. 

The myth of the man becomes enough of a threat where Uther Pendragon himself grows wary of the possibility that he will enter Camelot and wreak his havoc here. He orders his knights to double up on guard duty, to sweep the forest in pairs or groups of three. 

Nobody knows the silver-armed man is just as deadly against a group as he is against one, and Morgause smiles to herself as she watches the knights dispatch in shifts throughout the day, looking for something that isn’t there.

-

He’s twenty-four years old when Morgause restores all of his memories and he kills Uther Pendragon. 

It’s nighttime when he slips into the king’s chambers and quietly, expertly strangles him, metal fingers tightening around a vulnerable throat that lay bare on the pillow. It’s only fair, Morgause had taught him, seeing as how Uther spent so much of his life dedicated to wiping out their kind, that it’s someone like Merlin who kills him. _Don’t use magic to do it_ , she’d told him. _Show him that humanity is just as deadly_.

It’s such a clean job that there aren’t even any bruises around Uther’s neck when the guards find him in the morning. In fact, nobody suspects foul play until Gaius studies the body later. 

“How could this have happened?” he asks Merlin over dinner the night after the king’s death. “He was here. Right under our noses.” Gaius shakes his head, unable to fathom how the man they call a ghost story slipped through Camelot and committed such an atrocity. 

“Arthur is already getting ready to hunt him down,” Merlin says through a mouthful of potatoes. “After the king is buried properly and Arthur takes the crown, he plans to leave.”

“And you’ll go with him, I’m assuming?” 

Merlin smiles and manages to hide all traces of venom from his lips and teeth, with such ease as though he’d never been any person other than this devil with a silver arm. “Of course.”

Merlin is by Arthur’s side when the latter is crowned king. His left arm aches.

-

He’s a beast, a shadow, a leviathan in King Arthur’s presence, and all he wants to do is take the kingdom by the throat and squeeze.

-

It’s the sixth century and he finally learns that they’ve been calling him the Winter Soldier.

Merlin likes it.


End file.
